Yesterday I was walking up my street to the shops and within a hundred metres or so I heard three different languages and it made me smile. Whenever I go travelling and I hear lots of different languages being spoken it makes me smile. Firstly because I’m travelling and obviously on holiday which always makes me smile. Secondly because it reminds me that there are so many people in this world and so much else is going on so whatever might be bothering me is put into perspective.

Hearing lots of languages here in Australia makes me smile too because we have a hugely multi-cultural population here which has only made Australia better. It also reminds me of the times when I am travelling. Again, awesome.

When I was walking up the road yesterday though it got me thinking of those people you see in youtube videos telling immigrants to speak Australian because “we were here first” and they should fit in or fuck off back to where they came from. Uh, no actually. We white Australians were not first. We were about 40,000 years too late to that party. When these people feel so threatened by someone speaking a different language I’m guessing they are realising how small a part of the world they are too and how much more there is to the world that doesn’t even know their ignorant little brain exists and it scares the hell out of them.

We see those Nativist people in the USA all the time. There are the sort that scream “Speak American” and plan to vote for Donald Trump because he wants to build a wall around the USA to keep foreigners out. It’s all a disgrace, since the USA is a nation of immigrants with the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, a symbol of welcoming immigrants to our country.

A perfect illustration of how America is changing is represented by something which I read the other day. In Texas, the primary language spoken is English, followed by Spanish. Want to guess what the number three language is? Vietnamese!

I suspect most of the folks who speak Vietnamese live on or near the Gulf Coast and are involved in shrimping and fishing, since I know that most of the shrimp from Louisiana are harvested by Vietnamese and Cambodian former refugees, now citizens, thank you very much. :)